Reply #16: Ahh, now we're straying into the old 'inductive' vs. 'deductive' debate. [View All]

[Kutjara]

Karl Popper made some good arguments that the scientific method has never been 'deductive,' no matter how much it tries to portray itself as such. Scientists don't typically observe some phenomenon and then develop a hypothesis to explain it (although they did this far more in the past when such phenomena were directly observable with the naked eye). Instead, they dream up hypotheses based on extrapolations of existing theories (or perhaps gratuitous conjectures) and then go looking for the phenomena that will confirm or refute the hypothesis.

This view very much supports the 'philosophical' approach you mention. I don't know if it will ever extend as far as religion, where we are dreaming up untestable explanations and then accepting them on faith. I hope not.

Actually, I didn't mean to say that if something isn't testable, it isn't true. Instead, I'd rather say if it isn't testable, there's no way of knowing whether it's true or not, so we can't really have an opinion about it and call that opinion 'science.' The Universe may very well have started in a Cosmic Egg or been seeded by extrauniversal scientists in their lab or thought into being by the Great Bird of the Cosmos, but there is no way we can (currently) test any of these assertions and so, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, we must remain silent.